Remember reading about the largest river in the world – The enormous amazon in South America. Why is it so large? One of the big reason is its location – right at the equator where it rains almost everyday! Hmm Lots of rain, a big river and a fertile land around it are perfect for making of a rainforest. Yes! we are talking about the giant rainforests of the amazon.
Amazon rainforest represents half of the total rainforests left on our planet. There are so many trees so close to each other that the rain falling on the canopy sometimes takes as long as 10 minutes to reach the forest floor. Some of these trees are 750 to 1,000 years old.
The biggest tree of the Amazon rainforest is The Kapok Tree. It can grow to 200 feet tall and the trunk can be 10 or 11 feet in diameter.
The Water Lily found here is the biggest flower in the world and can reach six feet wide. In the Amazon rainforest sometimes lakes are covered with water lilies. Someone can easily confuse it with floor covered with flowers !!
The number of edible fruits found in the rainforest is estimated in 3,000 while only 200 are cultivated by humans for eating.
There are some tribes that live in the rainforests and are touch with outside world but deep inside the rainforests there might be 50 tribes that have never had contact with the outside world.
And this is not all. We haven’t even begun to talk about the wildlife in amazon. Well, should leave that for another time.
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